News Flash!
Rand Paul promises to carry the message to Washington that Kentucky is not happy that big government turned an incipient depression into a recession; they want a full fledged great depression along with reduced military spending, cuts to Medicare, and tax cuts for New York billionaires.
OK, those aren't his exact words, but it is what his words meant. He never would have gotten elected if he had said what would result from cutting government in the middle of a depression.
Earlier today, Rick Santelli (a former hedge fund manager now reporting for CNBC, who practically created the Tea Party with a live rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade) argued that the Fed action in September 2008 along with Bush's TARP bailout of major banks (October 2008) and Obama's stimulus plan (February 2009) is responsible for the depression that started in the summer of 2008 ... and then moments later hoped that the Fed would ignore his economic ideas and come through with more quantitative easing, arguing that the markets he follows would collapse if we don't get more stimulus because the Republicans in Congress sure won't provide it!
I can see why he got out business and became a reporter.
I have to wonder what Santelli would say on Wednesday if the Fed were to announce that there won't be a second phase of quantitative easing (QE2 in current parlance) in response to public demand for less government intrusion in the markets. I'll bet he would panic as the bond market collapsed.
2 comments:
The basic problem with the PhD is that it convinces the recipient that they can comment intelligently on subjects about which they know nothing.
I could tell the difference between s*** and shinola long before I got a PhD, but the PhD did develop additional critical thinking skills that help when one decides to know a lot more than nothing about a particular subject.
Just three major examples: The Obama stimulus has created over a million jobs and the Bush TARP kept the world economy from collapsing in 2008, yet liars persist in pretending there was nothing wrong until Obama took office. The Republican Party campaigned actively this year with TV ads opposed to cutting a half trillion of fraud out of Medicare over the next decade. The Repubs also objected strenuously to the recovery act, which meant they objected to the quarter trillion in tax cuts for middle income taxpayers included in that bill, while claiming they are for tax cuts.
It is a fact that Rand Paul wants cuts to Medicare and Social Security, just as he wants to cut military spending by pulling back from overseas and cut taxes for billionaires. He stopped talking about that after he got the nomination, but he was quite clear about his libertarian positions on those subjects.
Similarly, Rick Santelli is not an expert economist, just a former hedge fund manager. In a particularly funny moment this week, one person made a side-snark about listening to economists about the crash Bush kept us out of, and then closed his mouth without saying who not to listen to. Remember, Santelli's original rant was about Bush policies (TARP) since Obama's bill hadn't been passed yet, yet he blamed Obama for TARP. His latest nonsequitur (attacking Congressional and Fed stimulus programs and then hoping the Fed would implement another) was there for all to see.
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